As Toronto continues to develop and change at break-neck speed, many residents are looking for ways to preserve memories of different parts of the city. In order to facilitate this, the City has announced that it will be auctioning off a collection of decommissioned street signs.

photo of decommissioned street signs, image courtesy of the City of Toronto

Next Monday, April 28, the auction, run online by Platinum Liquidations, will open to the public. The signs will be displayed for 60 days and sold individually with a starting price of $30, with new signs expected to be added daily. The City estimates that about 1750 signs will be up for auction and that between 200 and 300 will be added annually to the auction. Not all of the signs the City replaces will be auctioned off: the badly damaged signs will be recycled instead. In 2007, the city adopted a program to replace damaged signs with newer, more legible ones. Every year the city about 1800 street signs due to damage or age. 

Denzil Minnan-Wong, the  City's Chair of Public Works and Infrastructure stated that "over the past few years, the public has shown great interest in owning a piece of the city's history, and we are very pleased to be providing this opportunity."